Lean Thinking emphasises the concept of value - which in business is the creation of product/service features and attributes that the customer wants or needs AND is willing to pay for. The second criterion of that statement is very important. If the customer is not willing to pay for something you are creating or adding

Are you doing everything you can to make your organisation efficient? Do you run a very ‘tight’ and ‘lean’ company.. Good! But it’s not enough. Efficiency is the baseline. It is where all organisations should start from. It is almost a ‘given’. If your competitors are also striving for efficiency, they will be at the

I saw someone suggesting the other day that increased private  investment in (private) education would improve its productivity. Think this is debatable? As in many other areas, it depends on how you define and measure productivity. We all know that productivity is quite different than production or output: fundamentally it involves the incorporation of resources

Remote or distance working (often referred to as ‘working from home’) has become increasingly popular over the last decade. There is no doubt that fir many job roles, the technology exists to facilitate such working. Access to company data and services is no longer a problem. What is still a problem, however, is that most

Interesting question, is it not?  I guess you found it interesting or you wouldn't be reading this. So what do you need? Well fundamentally - just one thing. A burning desire to identify and eliminate waste in all its forms - waste of resources, waste of effort, waste of talent, waste of time and so

I talked recently to the Young Fabians (a UK-based left wing think tank) about "Britain's puzzlingly poor productivity".  In such situations, people often want to know the 'secrets' or the 'answers'. The YF were too smart to expect that. They understand that complex problems require hard thought, experimentation and multiple potential interventions. Of course, experience

I used to ask myself the question... What have you done today to improve the organisation? Now I am older and wiser, I ask ... What have you done today to improve your life? After all, work is part of life and we are understandably being asked to think about work-life balance. Too many people

UK productivity has been bad for quite a long time and productivity growth is currently low. What impact will BREXIT (the departure of the UK from the European Union) have? Well, we don't know all the implications but here is one scenario. The UK is currently a high employment, low wage economy with lots of

Do you use a task manager to help you schedule tasks and activities?  Many people do.  There are many apps out there to help you. Do you wake each morning, look at your list of outstanding tasks and feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things you should achieve that day. You are setting yourself

What is the most important thing to be done in a business? Is it creating the vision? Is it setting strategy? Is it managing people? Is it building a supply chain? Well, all of these are important - but perhaps the biggest single thing to be done is to build relationships - with all stakeholders